1. Benchmark Lesson 1: Position, Velocity, Acceleration
Key words: position, distance, displacement, speed, velocity, average velocity, acceleration.

2. What is the position of the the girl? What is the position of the boy?
ORIGIN
Meters
What is the position of the the girl? What is the position of the boy?

3. What is Position?
Position is the location of an object; in physics, typically specified with graph coordinates.
Position tells you location.
Location of an object relative to an origin.

4. If the girl started at her house, what is her displacement?
1 Block
If the girl started at her house, what is her displacement?

5. What is Displacement?
Displacement is the direction and distance of the shortest path between an initial and final position.
Adds the concept of direction to distance.
Displacement is precise: the direction and length of the shortest path from the initial to the final position of an object’s motion.

6. What is the speed of the go cart?
Meters
3 s

7. What is Speed? Velocity? Speed tells you how fast something is going.
55 mi/hr; 3 m/s
Velocity is the measure of how fast and in which direction motion is occurring.
Average Velocity is displacement divided by time.
Instantaneous Velocity is the velocity at a specific time.

8. Tortoise and the Hare Simulation
Shodor.org/interactivate/activities/Tortoise

9. What is Acceleration? Change in velocity
When you speed up or slow down, you are accelerating.
When you change direction, you are accelerating.

10. Practice Placemat Problems
If you walk exactly 200 steps North, turn around, and then walk exactly 400 steps South, how far are you from your starting point?

11. Practice Placemat Problems
A car goes North a distance of 120 miles during a time period of 3.0 hours. What is the average speed of the car during this time interval?

12. Practice Placemat Problems
A small cart is rolling along a horizontal surface and you measure that the cart moves a distance of 3.25 meters over a time period of 1.35 seconds. What is the aver speed of the cart?

13. Practice Placemat Problems
A car is moving with a speed of 65 mph when a squirrel runs into the road in front of your car. The driver then hits the brakes and reduces the speed of the car to 25 mph over a time period of 2 seconds. What is the average rate at which the speed of the car decreases during this time period?

14. Practice Placemat Problems
A race car, moving initially with a speed of 15 m/s, is capable of accelerating at a rate of 6 m/s2. What will be the speed of this car after accelerating for a time period of 8 seconds?

15. Data Analysis
Time (s)
Distance (m)
Velocity (m/s)
Acceleration
(m/s2)
0.0
0.1
0.042
0.2
0.170
0.3
0.374
0.4
0.668
0.5
1.054
A tickertape timer is to be used to measure the speed and acceleration of a block of wood dropped out of a second story window. While attached to a piece of tickertape threaded through a timer, the given TIME and POSITION data are collected.

16. In Your Groups…
Determine the average speed during each of the time intervals.
Determine the average acceleration during each time interval.
Determine the average acceleration during the entire 0.5 second time interval.
Each group member will ‘round robin’ to compare and contrast problem solving steps.

17. Think…
Why are there only 5 answer spaces in the SPEED column of the table and only 4 spaces in the ACCELERATION column?